What therefore is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies,
anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations, which have been
poetically and rhetorically intensified, transformed, bejeweled, and which after
long usage seem to people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

Friedrich Nietzsche,"On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral
Sense"

Let us review the ground we have covered thus far. It seems that we
regularly hold people responsible for what they believe or fail to
believe, praising or blaming them when it seems appropriate. We found that
while responsibility for a state of affairs implies some form of control over
that state of affairs, it need not presuppose basic or immediate or direct
control over it. In fact, we hold people responsible for many states of affairs
over which they have no direct control.

The control necessary for responsibility need only be a form of long
term control or a control theorized in terms of influence. As such
it does not require "act foresight" of the consequences of actions and
practices. Since we do not appear to have direct control over belief, our
responsibility for belief, therefore, must be accounted for in terms of how we
come to have and how we engage in certain fundamental patterns of doxastic
practice or habits.

Accordingly, there are many cases that are clearly ones of epistemic
responsibility, but this does not imply that praise and blame attach primarily
to individual beliefs and their propositional contents. Rather, it implies that
beliefs are praiseworthy or blameworthy in respect to how they were
formed--which doxastic practices were engaged in and in what manner they
were engaged. Cases of epistemic blame can, therefore, be distinguished from
those cases in which allowable practices engaged in properly are engaged in an
ethically blameworthy situation. Thus the student who sneaks a peek at the exam
his professor has left on the desk gains knowledge in an ethically blameworthy
fashion, though the knowledge itself is not epistemically impeachable. That is
to say, there is a distinction between general ethical norms (including those
that define when a practice is properly engaged in, merely ethically speaking)
and epistemic norms (including those that define how a practice is to be engaged
in properly for the purpose of epistemic success).

Epistemic obligations were related to justification in the following
ways. A belief's having or not having justification (i.e., it's being in a
state of justification) is not the same as a belief being such that it is
reasonably taken to be (prima facie) justified. Nor is it the same as being
able to justify a belief by arguing that it is reasonably taken to be prima
facie justified. That is to say, reasonable ascriptions and practical defenses
of justification do not precisely track actual cases of justification, though
they are sufficient, pragmatically speaking.

Thus, while a deontological account of a belief's being in a state of
justification cannot be given successfully, it may be possible to give a
deontological (or prescriptive) and action-guiding account regarding how to form
beliefs that are reasonably taken to be (prima facie) justified, how to make
practical ascriptions of (prima facie) justification, and what kinds of belief
are defensible. The basic epistemic obligation, then, is to form beliefs only
on the basis of well-established doxastic practices that are properly engaged.

Which practices count as well-established is a matter of some debate.
At the very least, the following characteristics can be among those that are
(jointly) sufficient for a practice being well-established: it is engaged in by
significant portions of a population; it does not produce outputs that are
(massively and persistently) inconsistent either internally or in relation to
outputs of other practices; it provides significant self-support; it is
well-structured; and so on. Being well-established is clearly a matter of
degree.

In respect to the practices discussed in the last chapter together with the
material from Millar, these points imply that a well-established practice will
make use of a coherent conceptual framework (this is also, in part, what
leads to consistent outputs). Furthermore, it is primarily inconsistencies
between the outputs of several practices indexed to the same conceptual
framework that are epistemically important. It is perilous, therefore, to
compare the outputs of a practice within one conceptual framework to those of
another practice (or even the same or analogous practice) within another
framework. Such outputs must be placed in their own conceptual contexts and the
extent of overlap between frameworks is epistemically important to evaluation.

It may also be the case that, since conceptual frameworks are pragmatically
structured and action guiding, that teleological considerations must be
taken into account in evaluating practices--both in terms of their
presuppositional function and actual effects. That is to say, it may be the
case that the ends presupposed by a certain practice must be epistemically
legitimate ends for a practice to count as well-established. Furthermore, the
effects of pursuing those ends might have to be epistemically legitimate
effects. What this exactly means will occupy us below, especially in Chapter
6. For now it is important to note that such an approach may necessarily import
normative assumptions--whether teleology is evaluated in terms of the will of
God or in terms of Nietzschian considerations of its life-affirming value or in
terms of some other norm. In other words, more properly ethical considerations
may well enter into epistemic evaluations of doxastic well-establishment.

Furthermore, since doxastic practices are pragmatically aimed, epistemically
important inconsistencies within a practice or between practices within a
conceptual framework cannot be limited to mere logical inconsistencies between
propositional doxastic outputs. Rather, there can be inconsistencies between
those outputs of a practice (e.g., the belief that individual freedom and rights
are of great importance and value) and the practical effects that the
same practice produces or enables to be produced (e.g., a proliferation of
disciplinary technologies that are believed to contribute to freedom, but really
enslave; cf. Foucault 1979; Bartky 1990:63-82).

These sorts of inconsistencies may be concealed from most of those who engage
the doxastic and non-doxastic practices that give rise to them and that
concealment may be a function of the practices themselves. Conditions regarding
the accessibility of grounds may, therefore, also be important in these
situations for the purpose of evaluating belief.

Also note that the scenarios of these last paragraphs while not, I think,
unusual in any way, also do not characterize most of our rudimentary beliefs
about the world from sense perception and memory (apart from those held by
subjects we classify as suffering from psychoses and the like). These scenarios
are, however, important for many of the beliefs that are most dear to
us--regarding ethics, value, aesthetics, personal fulfillment and satisfaction,
politics, art, literature, our neighbors' welfare, religion, worship,
conversation, economics, family, sexuality and gender, race, and the like.

Finally, there is the matter of what it means for a practice to be engaged in
properly. Proper engagement is largely a socially defined matter that
includes a number of social factors: whether the subject is engaging a practice
to the correct epistemic ends, whether the subject is in an epistemically
legitimate position or has the right sort of epistemic authorization to engage
the practice, and so on. Though this area is socially regulated it will also
draw out epistemically important characteristics of the believing subject: her
emotional state, her personal identification with or rejection of social forms,
her desires and goals, and so on. Deviance from some ethical norms in these
areas may have significant epistemic fallout and thus it is proper in those
cases to classify such norms as not merely ethical, but also as epistemic norms.

Towards the end of clarifying the issues outlined in the last several
paragraphs, we will begin by turning to the work of Michel Foucault and his
theorization of power/knowledge, desire, and so on. Foucault gives a lot of
attention to conceptual frameworks (roughly, what he terms "discursive
formations"), social epistemic norms, social epistemic teleology, and the like.
Thus he will be of great assistance in discussing and penetrating many of the
issues raised. This chapter will introduce the basic outlines of Foucault's
theories in regard to what are more external, clearly epistemic, and conceptual
aspects of belief-formation. The following chapter will focus more on what is
internal to the subject, on teleology, and on the ethical.